You are correct about that; none of my personal stuff has been on Windows for over a decade now. Come to think of it, none of the "heavy lifting" at $WORK has been on Windows either.

I presume the builtin Windows excuse for a terminal emulator does not properly handle ASCII backspace and overwrite? Have you tried rxvt or other ports of X11-native terminal emulators that actually work? There is even a MinGW X server if I recall correctly, so you could use xterm on Windows. :)